Smoke Pot, Not E-mail / In which it is proven that excessive info lust makes you dumber than a happy pothead. Isn't that great?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 13, 2005

D
idn't you already just know? Didn't you already sort of see it coming?

That is to say, didn't millions of us already sense, deeper down, despite all this mad orgasm of technology and despite all this incredible ability to stay in constant touch and despite how you can now travel almost nowhere in the world save for remote parts of the Amazon jungle where you cannot be tracked or e-mailed or faxed or called on the cell or FedExed a package from Amazon.com, don't you just know that we are, in fact, lowering our IQs and slaughtering brain cells like Karl Rove murders joy?

It's true. It has now been proven. A new study sponsored by Hewlett-Packard shows we are now being openly pummeled like Arctic baby seals by our own glorious and demonic tech creations, that when we indulge in huge relentless gobs of e-mail use and cell phone use and instant messaging and Blackberries, et al., that we are, in fact, enduring the ongoing death of brain cells, the happy suicide of mental capacity, a very noticeable drop-off of IQ points.

And, according to the study, this drop-off is even more pronounced than the happily incapacitated state we enjoy after smoking a large, happy joint. A spliff. Gangster. Kif. Ganja. Only without the dry mouth and the giddiness and the swoony sparkle and the smooth mellow bliss and the desperate right-now urge to lick a very large salty pizza and then have sex and take a nap.

Infomania makes us dumber. Slower. Dimmer. Make a note of it. Write it on a Post-it and stick it on your monitor right now and stare at it like a mantra and then vow to yank the cables out of your brain and get outside and play with the dog and read more big thick books full of polysyllabic words and complex sentence structures and then, oh yes, be sure to smoke more pot because hey, it sure as hell ain't as bad for you as e-mailing like a maniac all day.

Because this is the funny thing, the ironic thing, the thing that confounds us and makes us go no way that can't be true because just look! I am doing nine things at once! I can drive my bloated SUV and chat online and answer e-mails and type in my bitchin' Blackberry and send instant messages and bang out text messages on my cell with my nose and still have room to think fond thoughts about my penis, all at the same time! I am superhuman! I am the wave of the future!

Wrong.

But this is what we think. We think technology is making us sharper, more efficient, more light and nimble and connected and enlightened and more primed to hotwire our bodies straight into the grand cosmic mainframe so we can finally be forever placed atop God's own personal IM Buddy List.

And much of the sci-fi bookshelf is taken up with visions of people as human/machine hybrids, these glorious yet weirdly damaged beings who have happily sacrificed hunks of their analog, low-tech humanity at the altar of high-tech hardwired info glory and we're like oh my God that is so cool! I can't wait until I can play a video game in my sunglasses and merely think about any person on the planet and have my intracranial implant chip automatically dial their intracranial implant and them I can speak to them through a microphone implanted in my tooth!

But, alas, we are not smarter. We are not deeper. We are not even all that much more profoundly connected to anything larger or more significant. We need to know this.

All we are now is more adept at allusion, at skimming like lightning over the surface of things, at referencing the world more deftly, while comprehending it less. We can quick-link and cross-text and multi-chat while at the same time remaining blissfully ignorant of how these very info tools are quietly destroying that all-important human skill, that slower, longer, often far more subtle and difficult art called deeper understanding, and if you've lately been anywhere near a roomful of teenagers, you understand this phenom perfectly.

On first blush, the next generation, they appear to get it. They are wired like a telephone pole. They speak the lingo and are fluent in ring-tone programming and iPod bells and HTML whistles and nothing but nothing in the tech sphere gets by them and you'd think, wow, these kids, they must be info supergenuises by now, so aswim are they in giant pools of gizmos and information and communication ease.

But then you hear them speak. They you hear them try to form a complete sentence about an actual subject of interest and struggle to form a single nuanced and careful thought that has nothing to do with what was on the WB or what video they just watched on their PSP or what their friend just text-messaged them on their Nokia, and you hear them fumble and slur and fall into huge pits of painful, tortured Bush-like grammar and you go, oh my freaking god we are in deep, deep trouble.

And of course, it's not just teens. It is the way of America. We have embraced infomania like a Republican embraces dead trees. We think, because we see it on the Net or because Bush mumbles it into the TelePrompTer or because someone sent it to us via e-mail that it must be true, while at the same time the sheer speed and ferocity of the delivery technology denies us the right to sit back and think more deeply about it all. Faster info, slower absorption. America, thou art one giant episode of "Short Attention Span Theater."

But oh, we don't seem to care. Maybe the trade-off is worth it? Maybe it really doesn't matter if we're just a little dumber and a little less coherent and a little less able to process complex thoughts, so long as we can e-mail 27 people while simultaneously talking into the speaker phone while downloading "Weapons of Ass Destruction III" as the iPod resyncs with the new NIN album. Or maybe that's just me.

Or how about this: Maybe we need to start looking at our info lust as merely yet another addiction, a narcotic, a happy necessary globally hailed universally embraced drug. E-mail as mental tranquilizer, intellectual emetic, Zoloft for the wired masses.

Maybe, after all, it's time we bring e-mail and IM and the like more in line with our other delicious vices and necessary enhancements, and just say, screw that deep brain stuff, it's time to kick back, light a spliff, pour some scotch, fire up the e-mail. Hell, it sure beats thinkin'.

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